Robert Zubrin is an American aerospace engineer, famous for being the driving force behind Mars Direct, a proposal made in 1990 to use the Martian atmosphere to produce oxygen, water, and rocket propellant for the surface stay and return journey. A modified version of the plan was subsequently adopted by NASA as their "design reference mission", and Elon Musk also adopted the idea now for his Mars plans.

He's the author of the bestselling book The Case for Mars first published in 1996 which famously inspired Elon Musk to go to Mars.

He also wrote among others: The Case for Space (2019), The Case for Nukes (2023) and The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet (2024).

Following the success of his book The Case for Mars, Robert Zubrin founded the Mars Society which is still active to this day and holds a convention every year.

01:00 : Why Elon Musk's Mars plan will fail

05:00 : Why instead we need a mini-Starship (aka Starboat) to succeed

06:35 : The technical, philosophical and political problems with Elon Musk's Mars settlement vision

13:54 : If the Starship is made to work and is as cheap as promised, wouldn't a Mars mission happen irrespective of who's in power in the US?

15:58 : What the first Starship sent to Mars should bring

17:27 : What the right Mars program should be

19:10 : What Elon Musk told Robert Zubrin about his Starboat suggestion

23:24 : Could Robert Zubrin's Starboat be lifted to orbit with a Blue Origin rocket?

25:12 : Has Robert Zubrin exchanged ideas with Jeff Bezos ?

26:12 : Robert Zubin inspired Elon Musk to go to Mars and Gerard O'Neil inspired Jeff Bezos with his vision of free-floating space colonies : why that vision is flawed!

28:25 : Before making grand plans to settle Mars, shouldn't we ensure we can thrive in its gravity? What if Mars gravity level is a showstopper for human settlement?

30:48 : Successful settlement efforts in the past were enabled by demographic growth, but now birth rates are dropping everywhere, then how realistic is it to think of millions let alone trillions of humans in space?

39:05 : Robert Zubrin talks about a labor shortage on Mars, but with the advent of robots and AI, wouldn't the need for human labor be reduced to a minimum? 

42:53 : Robert Zubrin wrote that if China is to compete in space, it will have to invoke the forces of liberty, but is that really necessary when one sees Chinese companies crushing western competitors in the EV, drone or battery industries, or able at least to catch up in the AI field?

46:31 : If the Americans were to focus on Mars, wouldn't there be a risk to let the Chinese preempt the best locations on the Moon?

49:54 : Robert Zubrin wrote "We're not endangered by a lack of resources", so with technology, can't we create material and energy abundance on Earth without having to mine Mars and the asteroids? 

56:54 : What's the business case to pay for a large population on Mars then?

01:04:05 : If Saturn's moon Titan was as far from Earth as Mars, which one should we settle first?

01:05:35 : Living on Mars : are domes are overrated? 

01:08:33 : Can nuclear power make a come back and trump the solar PV boom? The Chinese natural experiment

Questions among others I could not ask because of lack of time, for a future episode :)

What about the risk to contaminate Mars with Earth life and hence muddle the search for indigenous life? Shouldn't we keep Mars pristine for our robots only for now?

Fermi paradox: is there a Great Filter preventing ET from colonizing the galaxy? Is it behind us or in front of us as for our own species?

And also: Space war; does he think we'll get AGI and its impact on space exploration ; his Saturn Express plan ; his solution to fix climate change ; the opportunity of a giant array of telescopes on our moon to map Earthlike planets in nearby stars

Two years ago, Casey Handmer quit working on GPS science at NASA JPL to start Terraform Industries, a wild idea backed by visionary investors (including Stripe co-founder and CEO) to bolt our growing solar abundance to growing hydrocarbon scarcity.His plan? To make the world's cheapest green hydrogen, the world's cheapest direct air capture CO2, and cheap natural gas.

This is my conversation with Casey! It's quite long, but I've detailed the timestamps below, Casey elaborated on many important issues, make sure to give them a listen :)

Recorded on Oct 12th.

And mind the two questions about Mars at the end :)

* 00:00:28: Casey Handmer's background in science and industry and what led him to found Terraform Industries

* 00:02:30: Why Hyperloop One, which Casey worked on, didn't work as expected

* 00:04:38: Why "Terraform Industries" as the company name?

* 00:09:45: Terraform Industries' philosophy

* 00:13:20: How Terraform Industries is a fundamental bet on cheap solar PV electricity and why it will get ever cheaper for a long time

* 00:18:08: What the cost of solar PV electricity needs to be for Terraform Industries' green e-methane to start being competitive with fossil methane

* 00:20:20: What it needs to be for green e-kerosene to be competitive with fossil kerosene, in order to make aviation carbon-neutral

* 00:21:30: Casey explains how we may even be able to make food thanks to cheap solar, air and water

* 00:24:00: Can total cumulative solar PV deployment continue to double at current pace (approx. once every 2 years) long enough to have enough capacity to displace all fossil fuels?

* 00:30:15: Why has Casey been sharing his plans very openly so far? 

* 00:32:50: Casey shares an interesting analogy with the electric car industry

* 00:36:00: Can Europe compete with China on the EV market? do tariffs help?

* 00:37:55: How does Terraform industries work? What are the three subsystems of its first product?

* 00:41:30: Why does Terraform Industries want low-efficiency systems?

* 00:46:50: What should the be the cost of solar PV electricity for Terraform Industries' green e-methane to start being competitive?

* 00:49:00: What could be the market size for such machines? And as they're low tech and will be copied, what minimum market share could Terraform Industries hope to retain ultimately?

* 00:50:30: Does Terraform Industries intend more on selling the machines or operating the machines and selling green e-hydrocarbons?

* 00:53:25: Is what Terraform Industries is doing easier than coming up with and industrializing the Haber-Bosch process? (that helps fix nitrogen as ammonia from the air and make fertilizer, letting us feed billions more than if we didn't have it otherwise)

* 00:58:35: Hear Casey say which percentage of solar arrays, easily, will be used to make synthetic fuel 10 years from now, shocking!

* 00:58:52: What's the status right now for Terraform Industries? What are the next milestones?

* 01:01:28: What risks is Terraform Industries facing?

* 01:04:50: What about methane leaks? Especially as Casey Handmer expects world methane consumption to go up as methane gets cheaper and carbon-neutral

* 01:07:20: As Terraform Industries actually makes green hydrogen (before reacting it with captured CO2 to make methane CH4), why not stop there and provide hydrogen to the "hydrogen economy" that people see about to boom? For industrial heat, aviation, shipping etc.

* 01:13:20: Why is Casey Handmer fascinated with airships?

* 01:19:38: What about nuclear fusion? Could it help do without solar plants? (Helion talks about 1MW fusion plant the size of a container as opposed to 5-10 acres for a 1MW solar PV plant)

* 01:28:00: Why does Casey Handmer think that ultimately most of solar PV electricity will be used to synthesize green hydrocarbons for aviation (which will hence boom) as opposed to every other use combined.

* 01:37:00: Can Starhip be a thing when it comes to point-to-point transport on Earth?

* 01:39:55: Why taxing carbon doesn't work

* 01:44:00: Why current carbon capture and storage approaches can't scale to any meaningful scale

* 01:46:20: How does AI progress impact what Terraform Industries is doing? What would AGI do?

* 01:49:05: Will what Terraform Industries is doing be commoditized? Making it hard to find investors? 

* 01:52:35: Stratospheric Aerosol Injection : one of the two other important things we need to be doing to fix the climate crisis (beyond making all we do carbon-neutral for the atmosphere)

* 01:57:10: The other thing, "enhanced weathering", the best way to remove legacy CO2 from the atmosphere (possibly at $20/ton of CO2)

* 02:00:10: Casey Handmer's spiciest takes on energy (why batteries will ultimately bankrupt most long power lines, and also why it won't make sense to build more fission reactors)

* 02:08:48: What about the interseasonal intermittency problem with solar PV?

* 02:11:23: Hear Casey say why in the long term even methane pipelines will struggle to operate profitably as methane will be synthesized locally, even in temperate latitudes

* 02:19:30: Sending humans to Mars means bringing with us our microbes. As Mars could be habitable and inhabited by local microbes, even near the surface, we could ending confusing our search for life there, as Earth and potential Mars life may be related. Isn't that a reason to hold on for now and just send our robots which present much less of a risk?

* 02:24:24: We make all these plans to settle Mars, but what if Mars gravity is a non-starter for humans? Shouldn't the first thing be for us to build ae a space station that can be spun to recreate Mars gravity so as to test its effect on us, before anything else?

* 02:28:50: What surprised Casey the most moving from Australia to the US. About California and Texas.

* 02:32:00: Books recommended by Casey (see below for references)

* 02:32:45: About Elon Musk

Casey Handmer's blog articles we discussed (highly recommended):

* How to Produce Green Hydrogen for $1/kg

* Radical Energy Abundance

* Grid Storage: Batteries Will Win

* The Terraformer Mark One

* We should not let the Earth overheat!

* Terraform Industries Whitepaper 2.0 (Jan 2023)

* Is nuclear power a solution to climate change?

My explainer: Green, On-Demand, Abundant Energy by 2050 is Definitely Possible: Here's the Plan with the direct link to section 2 focussing on what Terraform Industries is doing

Discussed in the conversation:

* The Leuna factory in Germany, built by BASF in 1916, that Casey visited and mentioned at 00:54:40

* The Zeppelin Hidenburg scene in Indiana Jones and the last crusade (1989)

* See on Google Earth an open quarry by the sea, south east of Santa Catalina Island, opposite Los Angeles, mentioned when discussing enhanced weathering as the best solution to scrub the atmosphere of legacy CO2.

* Recommanded Books: 

* Pieces of the Action, by Vannevar Bush (1970)

* The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, a Doomed Tycoon, and the Scientific Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler, by Thomas Hager (2009)

Useful resources

* Casey Handmer's personal blog site

* Terraform Industries' website

* Terraform Industries' blog site

* Find Casey Handmer on Twitter

About the podcast host Thomas Jestin

* I'm the editor of the Future Weekly newsletter: my personal selection of news about some of the most exciting (and sometimes scary) developments in technology summarized as bullet points to help you save time and anticipate the future.

* Find me on twitter/X

* Contact me: [email protected]